For two weeks now, I haven’t completed a drawing. To keep from wasting illustration board (it isn’t cheap), I had to erase a couple of false starts. Maintaining a positive attitude, along with learning to cope with my compromised dexterity, is a challenge. A larger project would help me stay focused. The last few were novel-length. My latest manuscript included seventeen images of antique objects. It’s still at the query stage. I’m waiting to hear from a handful of publishers. In the meantime, I feel adrift. Reviewing my recent work, I began to wonder if I had ever depicted vintage collectibles in the past. The answer involved digging up a newspaper article that featured my design for the logo of a store.
The Davis Enterprise clipping is dated September 19, 1999 (I’m not a believer in numerology but find that pretty cool). I was, at the time, a scruffy-looking twenty-nine-year-old. The sandwich board in the foreground had been printed. I had painted the sign on the building by hand. My reasons for helping the proprietor — behind whom I appear to be hiding in the photograph — were not entirely professional. Regardless, she exhibited my art in her showroom later on.
What’s important to me, in retrospect, is how the antiques that I portrayed at the end of the twentieth century found their way into the pages of my third literary project after twenty years had passed. There is, it turns out, a precedent for my subject matter. Furthermore, I have rediscovered a memory as well as a title that I had forgotten: “creative assistant”.
Colin Turner's Work 